Mark McCarty

The coverage with evidence development (CED) process employed by the U.S. Medicare program may suffer from underutilization, but the authors of a new article in Value in Health see the attendant problems as administrative in nature. The issues include, but are not limited to, a lack of predictability as to when a CED study would be required for coverage of a medical device.

The U.S. FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health has rewired its organizational structure on several fronts, including a promotion of its communication function into a “super office,” which the agency said will help it be more agile and responsive to its strategic priorities.

Royalties for licensed patents ordinarily need not be paid after the underlying patent has expired, but the case of Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc. v. Insall would seem to throw out a cautionary flag regarding such agreements.

Denver-based Davita Inc. agreed to pay more than $34 million to settle allegations that the company violated the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) by not collecting management fees from physicians to induce referrals to the company’s dialysis clinics.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has provided updated guidance on the question of patent subject matter eligibility for inventions that rely on artificial intelligence, stating that a patent claim that does little more than recite an abstract idea is not subject-matter eligible.

The U.S. FDA cited Criticare Technologies Inc. for significant lapses in the company’s corrective and preventive action procedures, which suggests a need for outside certification of compliance because this problem was also observed in a warning letter from 2017.

The U.S. FDA literally wasted no time in posting twin warning letters to two companies in China that manufacture syringes that were the subjects of multiple recalls in the U.S.

In only the third such change in two decades, the FDA’s device center bids farewell to its director with the announcement that Jeff Shuren will leave the agency in the final weekend of July 2024.

Regulation of artificial intelligence for medical devices is still a developing space, but market competition authorities in the European Union, the U.K. and the U.S. are already examining the potential for anticompetitive behavior in this rapidly growing technological arena.

Artificial intelligence might solve a world of cost issues for medical science, but the results of a recent study suggest that the day has not yet come when hospitals and doctor’s offices can just feed data into a computer and expect a reliable and intelligible diagnosis.